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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shayuri" data-source="post: 4222688" data-attributes="member: 4936">Interesting.In my 3.5 games, the typical modus operandi as far as treasure goes is very similar to the original post. We -rigorously- keep track of values of treasure, because that's part of the power curve.It occurs to me though that this approach works because of one basic cornerstone.We sell like...90% of the stuff we find.Seriously. We sell practically EVERYTHING. It may be idiosyncratic to the games...where an overwhelming majority of the magical items comes from NPC's instead of monsters or discovered treasure. This means we find a lot of Rings of Protection, Cloaks of Resistance, Items of Neem Boost, and so on...all in values less than what we already own. They are, therefore, useless to us.Also, we tend to face guys who aren't like us in terms of class and weapon preference...so the looted weapons, armor, and other stuff tends to not be compatible.We might keep the odd wand, or occasional interesting trinket...but largely, the loot turns to gold, and is distributed evenly. Someone wants to keep something, it comes out of their gold supply. The rarity of high budget items, and the vast, swollen sum of gold, makes this work out fine.Reading the article on Wizards...this approach will -not- work in 4e. Selling items will almost always be counterproductive (depending on the cost of disenchanting). I already have house rules in mind for haggling based on what I've read, in fact...since a universal 20% buyback seems kind of arbitrary to me (not that 50% was any less arbitrary). But! That's neither here nor there. The point is...selling stuff will be far, far less efficient.Which brings me to another game I'm playing. In this game, we do not -have- access to towns and stores. If we want something, we either make it...or find it. Opportunities to sell stuff are few and far between. We're on the same power curve, but these limitations have radically altered our attitudes towards loot, and how it's distributed. We now proceed with the assumption that we're going to keep this stuff...and if we're keeping it, we may as well use it. The result is a more up for grabs, "Okay, who wants this ring of protection +1? Anyone? Well, I can use it for my familiar..." sort of thing. At first there was a transition period, where diehards were complaining that no one could use that thing, because their share value wasn't enough...but then we saw how silly it was to -keep a perfectly good item in a bag of holding- just because no one could "afford" to keep it. The distribution system was exposed as being a construct of rules mechanics, rather than game events.This chain of events is leading me to believe that I prefer the 4e system...at least in principle. Clearly, it requires a deft touch to make sure everyone's getting goodies. But that's no different than now. The devil will be in the details...which will be forthcoming soon. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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